ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the various digital system types and their relation to the modern-day music production studio. It gives a basic overview of the various stages that are involved in the encoding of analog signals into equivalent digital data, and the subsequent converting of this data back into its original analog form. The encoding and decoding phases of the digitization process revolve around two processes such as sampling and quantization. The Nyquist theorem is a basic rule that relates to the sampling process and states that: in order for the desired frequency bandwidth to be faithfully encoded in the digital domain, the selected sample rate must be at least twice as high as the highest frequency to be recorded. A digital system's signal-to-error ratio is closely akin to the analog concept of signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio. A process known as dither is commonly used during the recording or conversion process to increase the overall bit resolution of a recorded signal.
